This paper maps how religious ideas and moral imaginaries have constructed and reconfigured the category of the "New South." Since its inception, the contested meanings, uses, and significations of the "New South" have troubled scholars. Both academics and public figures have evoked the "New South" to depict and reinvent the region's identity, economy, and future and thus distinguish it from the Old South. The "New South" perennially evolves and shifts, so any singular redefinition is more of a reflection of the author and times than it is a final diagnosis. Instead of proposing a new definition or theory of the New South, this essay will examine the overlooked ways that religion, particularly American Protestant understandings of rebirth and salvation, has shaped early constructions of the "New South." Religion is essential to understanding the problem of the New South, since at its core, the New South is public mediation on the Old South, the South of slavery. Slavery and the war to defend it were supported, contested, and rewritten by religious claims, so any reflection on the ethics, politics, and culture of the Old South carries complex religious conations. New South has served as a vessel for Southerners to reflect on and renegotiate their own identity and to reframe America's founding sin to the rest of the nation. To be precise, I argue not simply that religion was an essential ingredient in early conceptions of the New South, but also that the nineteenth century architects of the "New South" employed what Catherine Bell calls ritualization. Formulated in her seminal 1992 work Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice, ritualization describes the way that actors use religious ideas and practices to distinguish an act as sacred. I contend that the original framers of the New South engaged a type of ritualization that drew on Christianity to distinguish the South as sacred, reborn, and chosen.